Gartner’s Market Information for Community Automation Platforms highlights that greater than 65% of enterprise networking actions are carried out manually, and solely a small however rising share of enormous enterprises automate greater than half of their community actions. Delivering superior digital experiences for an enterprise entails powering a number of, disparate networking domains and/or deploying a number of options inside a single area. This leads to a number of challenges for community operators, together with:
- Cross-domain and cross-product integration lead to “swivel chair” impact—context-switching between a number of administration consoles and dashboards—and require experience of particular person services to drive the required configuration.
- Present neighborhood automation instruments require scripting abilities, in addition to further funding, to allow collaboration and governance, and assist production-grade automation towards completely different services in an enterprise setting.
Because of this, customers expertise steep studying curves, prolonged implementation instances, and in the end suboptimal and under-maintained automation adoption throughout their international infrastructure.
To handle this complexity, we introduced Cisco Workflows, a brand new set of capabilities on the coronary heart of Cisco Networking Cloud, earlier this month in June at Cisco Dwell US 2024. Delivered as a cloud-hosted service, organizations can use Workflows to outline, automate, and orchestrate configuration duties inside and throughout their domains—branches and websites, campuses, information facilities, clouds—with only a few clicks utilizing a low- to no-code surroundings. Cisco Workflows helps customers give attention to accelerating enterprise worth, enhance infrastructure utilization and efficiencies, and cut back prices and time misplaced to guide errors.
Workflows presents out-of-the-box automation throughout a number of merchandise and domains, following design tips and finest practices beneficial in Cisco Validated Designs (CVDs). A strong set of low- to no-code customization choices (e.g., drag-and-drop API duties, information transformation) allow customers to simply modify and lengthen the automations for his or her particular use case. Workflows automates each cloud-hosted service APIs and on-premises community controller API endpoints. A safe cloud connectivity service hosted on-premises allows the connectivity from Workflows to the on-premises endpoints. Customers get real-time updates to trace workflows execution progress, pause execution to simply accept inputs from different customers inside the group, and evaluate audit logs of earlier automation runs. Workflows shall be accessible from inside Cisco Networking Cloud’s Cross Platform Navigator, by way of single sign-on (SSO), and thru embedded hyperlinks in numerous Cisco controllers.
Immediately, Cisco Workflows consists of the next Cisco controller adapters to run automation—Utility Centric Infrastructure (ACI), Catalyst Heart, Id Companies Engine (ISE), Catalyst SD-WAN, Meraki, and lots of extra. The automation hub gives two ready-to-go pattern validated automations utilizing these adapters:
- Campus to information middle establishes a networking material, with macro- and microsegmentation, securely connecting customers in campus (Catalyst Heart and Id Service Engine) to workloads and purposes working in a knowledge middle (Utility Centric Infrastructure).
- Automated hybrid department website deployment for branches that embody a mixture of Meraki (Wi-Fi and LAN) and Catalyst infrastructure (SD-WAN for routing). The automation performs stock pre-checks, onboards units inside the Meraki and Catalyst SD-WAN, and establishes connectivity between them.
Workflows, as a low-code procedural automation functionality, gives the fine-grained management and insights into execution stream required for the versatile implementation, debugging, and troubleshooting of cross-domain automation. Workflows resides on a platform that holds a number of certifications together with ISO 27001, ISO 27017, SOC 2 Sort 2, SOC 3, CSA, and STAR 1, underscoring our unwavering dedication to information safety and compliance. The service is designed to effortlessly scale automation throughout hundreds of thousands of endpoints worldwide whereas guaranteeing unmatched safety and seamless integration with hybrid cloud environments.
With this development, we proceed to simplify the expertise for our clients, empowering organizations to thrive in at the moment’s dynamic digital panorama with confidence and ease. Prospects and companions are already going via beta trials with Cisco Workflows.
“As beta testers, we’re starting to discover the brand new cross-domain automation performance inside Cisco Workflows. We’re beginning to migrate a few of our present automation scripts to the Workflows system and are excited to see how these capabilities will be capable to simplify duties for our clients sooner or later.” —Stefan Ronge, NTS (a managed service supplier in Europe).
“Now we have been exploring the beta capabilities offered inside Cisco Workflows and see an actual potential to assist automate key components of the networking infrastructure. Our analysis has been working on advanced multi-domain infrastructures together with Catalyst Heart SDA and ACI.” —Ingmar Schön, EnvOcean Community Programs (a community consulting agency in Europe).
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